jumpingfish

1. Breakfast

“Dad?” Ben said from the doorway.

It was early morning. He and Scout were already dressed. Trudy was too. I was still under the covers luxuriating in the warmth of our first cold night.

“Yes?”

“Will you make us eggs?”

I sat up and tossed the covers off.

“Sure,” I said and pulled on some jeans.

I ambled into the kitchen and turned on the burner and pulled the eggs out of the fridge. And I grabbed the last remnants of our Michigan red raspberry jam.

Will I make breakfast for them, indeed.

2. Morning Sky

Their plane left in the morning. So we had to get them to the airport early. And so we all bundled into Debbie’s van and drove off before 7:00am.

The sky was as black. But as we drove east, a thin ribbon of red was visible on the horizon, pushing against the black night. And with each passing minute the red glow grew and the black sky receded.

We dropped them off at the curb and hopped out of the van to say goodbye. Debbie opened the back of the van, and Ben grabbed his suitcase. Scout pulled her pack onto her back. Trudy walked around with Guinness on his leash. I stumbled out from the backseat, able to hear the conversation for the first time.

We all hugged. And then they walked into the airport talking to each other without looking back.

The sky was no longer black. The red ribbon in the east had grown into a wide swath of pinkish/white, and day was dawning.

3. Not Sad But Sad

I stood at the dining room table for a moment, holding a cup of coffee in my hand.  Then I looked up at Trudy.

“You know,” I said, pausing for a moment, looking down at my cup. “I’m not sad they’re gone.”

She looked at me.

“We’re past that now,” I said. “We have a new life, and I really like it.”

“So I’m not sad that they’re gone, but it kind of makes me sad that I’m not sad.”

Trudy smiled and chuckled and sipped her coffee.

My brother came to town for ACL again this year to hear the musicians sing and play.

He came for three days, and for most of that time it was cool in the evenings, and the sky was blue and sunny during the day. He had a pass which got him back stage with the important people and the free food and the air conditioned toilets that were always stocked with toilet paper. But on the last day when we went with him (for the fair and industrious Trudy had bought Sunday tickets for us), he ate Salt Lick barbecue with us and drank Maine Root root beer with us and hung out on the grass with us and watched the milling people and listened to the bands.

And at the end of the day as Jupiter rose in the east as bright as an evening star but on the wrong side of the firmament… As the lights of Austin lit up behind the stage across the river… As the shining sun set behind us in the west…

The Eagles came out on stage.

They were the headline act. They were why we bought tickets. My first album, one of three cassette tapes that I took with me to play in my clock radio when I moved into my college dorm, was their Greatest Hits album. The songs are burned into my brain: the guitars, the bass lines, the harmonizing vocals. And when they began, I had tingles running down my spine and tears running down my cheeks.

Now, you must know by now that the whole tears-running-down-cheeks thing is hardly rare for me.

But really, picture it. A warm evening. Glowing lights of the city. Colored spotlights on stage. Silhouetted Oaks and and Walnut trees to the right and left. A field of standing, singing, dancing, clapping, waving people, geezers and kids alike, extending back as far as we could see.

We cheered. We danced. We swayed and jumped and whistled and clapped.

And like everyone else all around us, we knew the words and sang along with the band.

—
Original photos (c) ACL Festival.

“For those of you who like pictures,” Bob said, “I’m sorry to say that this is the only one in my presentation. This subject doesn’t lend itself to images.”

And with that he went to his next slide.

It was black and white with word-packed bullets at various levels of indentation. Dense. Impossible to grasp. The kind of slide that makes you sit back and ignore what’s going on in front of you, because the speaker is saying one thing but the words seem to say something else, and it would be too hard to parse all that text, and you’d miss what the guy was saying, so what the heck, you lean back in your chair, and your mind begins to wander.

Then Jim raised his hand.

“Could you go back to your previous slide?”

Jim asked some question about something that caught his attention. And Bob answered. Then someone else asked a question. ?And there were others. And suggestions about unexplored issues. And what-ifs. And discussions about hidden assumptions. And…

And then time was up. All Bob’s time had been taken up by that one slide—by that one slide that had that one picture.

Yet the subject didn’t lend itself to images.

Have you seen the sky lately? Just after sunset with nary a cloud in the sky? As the soccer teams practice under bright white lights? With the western horizon still glowing pink and the east turning dark blue? Before the stars come out, with Venus sinking in the west and Jupiter rising in the east?

Have you seen it? You should.

Have you heard the owls in the trees? Late at night, long after the neighborhood is asleep? With cool air coming in thru the window. The hu-hu-hooting in the trees. One calling and then another responding, thinking that no one else is around to know?

Have you heard it? You should.

Have you been up late finishing that presentation for tomorrow? Finishing around midnight (well before you thought you would)? Thinking it was finally time to go to sleep, because there’s a long drive ahead in the morning? Realizing the your borrowed laptop (to replace your dropped, broken one) won’t fit the external monitor connector that you have? Realizing that you won’t be able to hook up to the projector? That you don’t know if you’ll be able to present your 8.5 x 11 colored, glossy slides after all?

Have you been up late doing that? Well, you shouldn’t.

We ran into Chris at Kerbey Lane. He was waiting for his friend Sam. We were waiting for a plate of hummus and tabouleh.

While Chris waited, we invited him to join us at our table. We talked about our jobs and the economy and the neighborhood and about wildflowers and butterflies and the elementary school.

When Sam arrived he walked up to the table, and Chris introduced us. We shook hands.

“I lived on your street street two years ago,” Sam said. “How long have you lived in Westcreek?”

Trudy and I looked at each other with looks of surprise that quickly turned to mutual shame.

“Ten years,” Trudy said.

We didn’t recognize him. Not his name. Not his face. Not his description of his dogs. We recognized nothing.

We sit in our yard on our bench for all the world to see on every sunny day. Every weekend we dig in the dirt and trim our trees and woody shrubs and water our wildflowers from rain barrels that sit at the front corners of our house. We are outside all the time. We shamelessly wave to anyone who walks or jogs or rides or drives by.

But we didn’t know Sam. ?We recognized absolutely nothing about this man who had lived at most a dozen houses down from us for years.

Suburbia.